There’s a Hole in My Arm

I wrote this yesterday but forgot to press publish:

“Turns out my feature on the Cyberpunk Apocalypse for the City Paper is the cover story. I only just discovered this because I’ve been asleep off and on all fucking day. I have that feeling like when you wake up from a nap and it’s as if you’re still dreaming. But now I’m drinking coffee and if that doesn’t work I’ll try beer. I feel like I should be a little more excited about the article than I am. I can’t even link to it because they haven’t updated the website yet for this week. But I’ll get to it.”

Now it’s Thursday morning and I’m trying to decide whether or not to go to work. My editor’s taking the day off so I don’t actually have to be in the office if I turn my work in, but I don’ have internet at my apartment yet so it’s either go to the office or be that asshole who sits in the coffee shop for hours on his computer and hardly buys anything. Also, here’s the link to my Cyberpunk story.

The cute girl who talked to me as we got off the bus, bitching about the Dark Knight Rises filming downtown and disrupting everything, is here at the coffee shop too, reading the City Paper. There’ really no way to go up and say, by the way my name’s on the cover, is there? Didn’t think so.

I have a hole in my left arm, right below the elbow. First it was a raw spot, I think from a carpet burn. Then it was a blister, then it was a popped blister, which tore off and left a hole. I picked out the scab one day and now it’ll probably scar. I’ve always been a scab picker.

I’ve been reading again. Thanks once more to Alexa for the vast array of short story collections she has to lend me. It’s called No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July. It’s just as bizarre as the Keret book but in an entirely different way. The voice reeks of innocence, despite the very sexual content of some of the stories. It’s the kind of voice that makes it seem like the speaker is experiencing the world through a dense haze. Even with the title the stories are filled with some very lonely people, and I myself have been feeling very lonely.

I spent the night at a friend’s last night, because she lives in Highland Park and by the time everything was said and done I didn’t feel like fucking with the buses. I also just like sharing a bed with someone. No sex, not even spooning, but it usually just feels nice to hear someone breathing next to you as you fall asleep. She passed out almost instantly, and I was left to my thoughts, which as it turned out was not the best thing for me. It was the first time I’d felt that lonely while sharing a bed.

Yup, I’m Falling Apart. But At Least I’m Reading.

Somehow I managed to twist my knee while sitting at my desk. This does not make sense. At least I slept eight hours last night, which is as rare an occurrence as, oh, something rare.

But at least I’m reading. I’m finally finished with The Nimrod Flipout, and it remains as weird as it was when I started reading it. The cover alone should have warned me: its a cartoon-type illustration of a guy in an orange rabbit suit, holding a shotgun and surrounded by dead birds. He looks somewhat pleased with himself, but more concerned with how exactly he got there.

All told I’m definitely glad I read it. There were stories I didn’t care for, like the one where a woman gives birth to a horse — pony, sorry — which is totally ripping off Stuart Little, amiright? But I did thoroughly enjoy many of the stories, and it gave me confidence, because of the relatively unorthodox voice, style, and subject matter, that maybe someday someone will want to read something I wrote.

Here’s a complaint, and it’s probably going to come out petty or pretentious. One of the quotes saying how good The Flipout, on the back, is by Gary Shteyngart, who I really should be reading apparently. He says the Flipout is “The best work of literature to come out of Israel in the last five thousand years — better than Leviticus and nearly as funny.” Ha! I thought it was a pretty great recommendation, but then it just seemed that by making that joke, Shteyngart was making it more about him than Keret. I know, it’s nit-picky, but it’s one of those things I can’t un-notice.

I have to go back to work now, and try not to fuck myself up any more than I have already. These office chairs are tricky.

People Who Work At Weave Aren’t Allowed To Read This Because It Involves The Stories I Submitted

It’d been over a week and a half and I still haven’t finished The Nimrod Flipout. Maybe I’m losing steam; I seem to remember tearing through books in June and early July, but this little one has been in my bag longer than any of the others. Not that I’m not enjoying reading it, it’s a shitload of fun. My favorite stories so far? Fatso (which I talked about already) Actually, I’ve Had Some Phenomenal Hard-Ons Lately (one of the more realistic stories, about a man, his wife, his lover, his penis, and his dog. Keret likes dogs) Pride and Joy (about a boy who grows very tall very quickly, and for every inch he grows his parents shrink one — it’s a very rare disease) More Life (two sets of twins have relationships and drama ensues) and For Only 9.99 Inc. Tax and Postage (the secret to the meaning of life is revealed in this booklet! Buy now!)

On the other hand I did manage to submit to Weave’s flash fiction contest (very late on the last day, because I like to live on the edge. By the way, if by any chance you’re reading this and you work for Weave: Spoiler alert! Don’t disqualify me with your page views!) I only ended up submitting two pieces instead of three, but I’m pretty happy with them. Even if I don’t win, which would be nice but I’m not holding out too much hope, it feels very good to have written something and sent it off somewhere. It makes it feel like less of an exercise in futility or navel-gazing.

The fun part was that for the second story, which is a (hopefully not too derivative) decline-and-fall-of-a-relationship kind of thing, I finished it in a semi-blackout state of drunkenness on a Friday night. I got to rediscover my own writing, which is new for me. I wrote the first three quarters of the story weeks ago, which brings the “plot” right up to the precipice of a big fight, but didn’t yet know how exactly I wanted it to go, nor whether I wanted the relationship to survive or not. Drunk me, apparently, is more decisive.

When I think about it now it’s kind of odd I wrote a fight. In my relationships, even the ones that last way too long and get into that sick state where there’s nothing to do but drag it behind a barn and shoot it, my partner and I almost never have big screaming matches. I guess it’s just not my style. I mean, even when my parents screamed at each other it was usually about something academic or esoteric like the Barnes Foundation. The most recent fight I had to draw on while writing happened two and a half years ago, and took place in a bathtub. The fight in the story didn’t take place in a bathtub, but now I’m kind of regretting that decision.

Bathtub fights can get pretty intense.

The Nimrod Flipout

For once, that totally random title up there isn’t mine. It’s the title of a book of short stories by an Israeli writer Etgar Keret, lent to me so nicely by Alexa. I’m not quite halfway through; I’ve been either out of town, busy with work, or drunk. But I asked for a book of short stories, and that’s what I got. I’m pleased to see, so far, that his stories are not uniform, which now that I think about it would have been pretty weird.

Some of them are the “plotless, quotidian” that Michael Chabon hates so much, but the thing is, I really liked them. The opening story is called Fatso, and in a nutshell it is about “you” a guy who, when you start getting hot and heavy with your new girlfriend, find out that at night, in much the same way Cameron Diaz in Shrek, she transforms into a fat, male soccer hooligan. So the story is about that, and then you kind of just… get over it. I love this story, and I have no idea why. I’m not kidding, why is this a good story? I’m guessing, grasping at straws, that it’s the tone and voice. It has the sensation of a person telling you a story, rather than a writer writing down a story that you then read, which makes me happy because that’s what I’ve been doing, in some cases.

The character sketch I’ve been working on is essentially this, characters at differing degrees of closeness to the main character telling the reader stories about the guy. So at least I know that it’s possible to write great stories that way, I’m not on a one-ended bridge, as it were. It’s a bit of a comfort.